We work with your organisation in 3 distinct ways. So, which one is right for you?
01 / BUILD THE SYSTEM
Problem:
Two restructures in rapid succession, cultural fatigue, and a strategic pivot in flight. The C-Suite operated in silos. The layer below had no identity as a unit. ICs promoted into management escalated instead of deciding. Execution had ground down.
Solution:
Leadership Baseline+ across 35 leaders, executive coaching and 8 modules aimed at the behaviours the data surfaced, peer triads running live through the pivot, then a month-9 re-baseline on the same instrument.
02 / ALIGN THE FUNCTION
Problem:
A fast-growing division built by acquisition. Leaders from acquired businesses running global teams through rapid change. A stated desire for greater change agility and more delegated authority in a complex, global, matrix environment.
Solution:
Leadership Baseline+ across 23 leaders and 1:1 deep-dive sense-making sessions to help leaders understand gap between self-view + how they actually landed. 6 Executive Coaching sessions each over 9 months, targeted at that gap.
03 / START WITH ONE TEAM
Problem:
Series B closed, headcount set to double in a year. The senior team was part new joiners, part the people who had built the company. Leadership impact was varying widely across it. The group were not maximising their collective impact as a cohesive unit.
Solution:
Leadership Baseline+ across the senior team, then a single offsite that put the data in the room. Each leader named the behaviour they were going to change and the person who would hold them to it. The team agreed how it would lead together, out loud, in front of each other
Rebuilding a leadership culture mid-pivot
Summary
A Series B FinTech scale-up ran a 12-month Careeryse leadership programme across 35 leaders, CEO to middle management, during two restructures and a strategic pivot. 80% of leaders showed peer-visible behavioural change by month 9. Change was measured by re-running the same Leadership Baseline+ 360 instrument and comparing peer ratings against the baseline.
35 leaders · 12 months · 4 phases
80%
of leaders showed peer-visible behaviour change by month 9
35
leaders, CEO to middle management, aligned in one consistent leadership system
What was slowing them down?
The company had been through two restructures in rapid succession while hunting for product-market fit. The organisation was culturally exhausted.
The behaviour was visible before anyone named it. The C-Suite operated in silos - decisions were made inside functions and defended across them. The layer below, the emerging leadership team, had no identity as a unit. They were a list of names on an org chart rather than a group that solved anything together. Individual contributors had been promoted into people management without a playbook or the tools to execute at scale, so they escalated instead of deciding.
Then, at the point where leadership alignment mattered most, the business pivoted strategically.
The pace of execution had ground down. The talent was there. The vision was there. The leadership infrastructure could not keep pace with either.
What did we do?
A 12-month leadership programme, built on the four parts of the Careeryse system.
Insight - the first three weeks. 35 leaders, from the CEO to key middle managers, completed the Leadership Baseline+ 360. Each respondent spent 7-10 minutes on the instrument, gathered over a two-week window, with reports the following week. Measurement covered the leadership population only. It was not run across the organisation.
Strategic Interpretation. The baseline data was read at two levels: an individual report for each leader, and an executive-level view for the business. The executive view surfaced where silos ran deepest, where trust needed most rebuilding, and where decision-making was operational and reactive. That analysis set the development agenda. There was no standard curriculum. The modules were pointed at the behaviours the data said were costing this business most.
Develop. Monthly Executive coaching for all participants in the programme. Eight, 2 hour, modules grounded in real Scale-Up challenges - self-leadership, performance management, influence, and others. Peer coaching partnerships to build psychological safety and encourage collaboration and relationships to be nurtured across functions. Triads to put learning into live application with immediate feedback.
The programme ran in parallel with the strategic pivot. Leaders practised new behaviours while navigating real organisational change. There was no simulation phase and no away-day.
Reinforce. The peer coaching partnerships, the triads and the accountability structures ran throughout, not afterwards. The re-baseline at month 9 was itself part of the reinforcement. Leaders knew the same instrument would be run again, on the same people, and that the second read would be visible.
How was behaviour change measured?
What was measured. Leadership behaviour across the five fixed dimensions of the Leadership Baseline+ framework: Self Leadership, Communication, Relationships, Organisational Intelligence and Developing Others. The framework does not flex between clients. It did not flex here.
How. A structured 360 instrument. Each leader was rated by the people around them - line manager, peers, direct reports - and completed a self-assessment. Reporting is at two levels: individual leader reports, and an executive-level view containing behavioural heatmaps, friction analysis, and the behaviours acting as Scale Drags or Scale Accelerators.
When. Baseline at the start of the engagement. Re-baseline at month 9, using the same instrument.
By whom. Peers, reports and managers. Not the participants, and not the facilitators. Peer-visible means the change registered with the people who work with the leader. A leader whose self-rating improved while their raters saw nothing does not count as changed.
The figure. 80% of the 35 participants showed peer-visible behavioural change between baseline and month 9. It is a count of leaders, not an effect size.
Limitations. Four are worth stating plainly.
There was no control group. The leadership population was measured against itself over time, not against a matched population that received no development.
The engagement ran concurrently with a strategic pivot and the aftermath of two restructures. Those events acted on the same leaders during the same window. Attribution of behaviour change to the programme alone is not available from this design.
Raters were not blind. They knew the leaders they rated were in a development programme, which is a known source of expectancy effects in 360 instruments.
A 360 measures how leadership is experienced. It is a record of perception, not of directly observed action. Careeryse takes that as the point rather than the flaw - perception is what teams act on - but it is a perceptual measure and should be read as one.
Business outcomes below - alignment, decision speed, execution pace - were reported by the client. They were not instrumented, and no causal claim is made for them.
What changed?
80% of participants showed peer-visible behavioural change at month 9. The shifts were observed across the organisation and were not confined to self-report.
C-Suite alignment improved. The next-level leadership team, which had begun with no identity as a unit, coalesced into a cohesive one. The ICs who had been promoted into management had tools and a playbook, and could execute at scale. Decision-making quickened. The pace of execution recovered through the pivot, not after it.
By the end of the twelve months, the business had a coherent leadership culture and a leadership population that could carry the next phase of scale.
This client measured how leadership was experienced across 35 people, changed the behaviours costing them most, and measured again.
Individual high performers do not add up to a leadership team.
Summary
A fast-growing payments division ran a 9-month engagement with a global leadership layer, drawn from three businesses acquired into a global matrix. Leadership Baseline+ established a behavioural baseline; each leader then had six executive coaching sessions targeted at the gap between their self-view and how they were experienced. Outcomes were qualitative and participant-reported. No re-baseline was run.
23 leaders · 9 months · 3 phases
3
acquired businesses brought into a single leadership community
23
leaders, across Director + Senior Directors of one innovative, fast-growing function
What was slowing this team down?
The division existed to drive commercial innovation in payments and it was growing fast, largely by acquisition. Its leadership team was not one team. It was leaders from three acquired businesses, now running global teams inside a matrix, at pace, through continuous change.
Three behaviours were thematically visible.
Leaders were not developing the people beneath them. Under delivery pressure they absorbed work rather than growing the person who should have owned it, which kept them in the detail and kept their teams junior.
Strategy was announced but not reinforced. It was communicated once, at the top, and then failed to show up in how leaders talked to their teams or in the decisions they made week to week. People below could not connect their work to it.
Feedback stopped at function boundaries. Leaders would say the difficult thing inside their own team and not across to a peer's. In a matrix, that is where the friction lives - so the friction stayed.
None of this was a talent problem. Every leader in the room was a high performer. The challenges were compounding through a lack of a cohesive leadership system.
What did we do?
A nine-month engagement, built on the four parts of the Careeryse system, aimed at one leadership population rather than the whole organisation.
Insight. Leadership Baseline+ across the leadership team. Structured 360 feedback, 7-10 minutes per respondent, rated by the people around each leader.
Strategic Interpretation. The distinguishing move on this engagement. Each leader sat in a 1:1 in-depth sense-making session and read their own data - specifically, the gap between how they saw themselves and how they were experienced by the people they worked with. The data was not delivered as a report. It was interpreted with them, and the interpretation set their development priorities.
Develop. Six 1:1 executive coaching sessions per leader over nine months, focused on personal leadership style, developing others, and upward strategic impact. No shared curriculum and no cohort content. One participant described the design better than we do: the programme, they wrote, works by "crafting a development plan that caters specifically to their needs and aspirations."
Reinforce. Coaching held each leader to a named commitment between sessions. In a participant's words, the coach "ensures that I am committed to action and helps me develop a concrete plan for change." Post-programme insights reporting closed the engagement with a structured reflection on what had shifted.
How was change measured?
On this engagement this section returns a narrower answer than usual, and that is stated rather than dressed.
What was measured at baseline. Leadership behaviour across the five fixed dimensions of the Leadership Baseline+ framework: Self Leadership, Communication, Relationships, Organisational Intelligence and Developing Others. A structured 360, rated by peers, reports and line managers, plus a self-assessment. The gap between the two was the working material of the engagement.
When. Once, at the start.
What was not done. The instrument was not re-run at the end. This engagement established a baseline and used it to target development; it did not re-baseline to evidence change against that baseline. The peer-visible behaviour change figure Careeryse reports elsewhere comes from engagements that did re-measure. It does not apply here and is not claimed here.
What the evidence is. Written feedback from participating leaders, submitted during and after the programme. Six responses are held on file. They are self-reported, they were not blind, and several were written mid-programme rather than at the end. They are testimony, not measurement.
Limitations. Three, stated plainly.
Self-report is the weakest available evidence of behaviour change. A leader who believes they now listen more may or may not be experienced that way by their team. Without a second read on the same instrument, the two cannot be distinguished.
The feedback responses were anecdotal and completed by 6 of the 23 participants. Leaders who found the programme most useful are more likely to have submitted testimonial.
No business outcomes were instrumented.
This is the honest limit of a diagnostic-plus-coaching design, and it is why Careeryse always recommends a re-baseline into engagements of this nature.
What changed?
The consistent theme across participant feedback is behavioural, not attitudinal. Leaders describe doing different things, not feeling better.
They report engaging differently across functions - the coaching, one leader wrote, improved their handling of situations "collaborating with cross-functional teams or working with my own leadership."
They report challenging peers rather than working around them. One participant described returning to the question of why in their own work, and using it to "challenge those around me in a positive way."
They report stepping back. One wrote simply of learning "to step back and listen more."
They report acting rather than reflecting. Another described "tangible actions that are already enhancing the way I engage with colleagues and lead at work."
Several leaders emerged as more influential figures across the wider organisation, crediting the work with raising their profile and creating movement between functions. The leadership team moved from a collection of individual high performers to a coherent, aligned leadership community.
The engagement began with each leader seeing the distance between who they thought they were and how they actually landed, and the work followed from there.
A strong leadership team can still be an inconsistent one.
Summary
A Series B scale-up, doubling headcount within a year, ran Leadership Baseline+ across its senior management team followed by a single offsite. The data showed strong average leadership capability (peer mean 4.35 out of 6) held unevenly across the team, with a 1.6-point spread between its strongest and weakest leaders. The engagement produced a baseline, individual commitments and a collective leadership contract. It did not re-measure.
Series B scale-up · senior management team · one offsite
4.35/6
average peer score across the senior team. Strong group with no red flags.
1.6
points between the team's strongest and weakest leader on that same scale.
What was slowing this team down?
The company had just closed a Series B and intended to double in size inside a year.
The senior team was two teams: new joiners hired to run the next phase, and the people who had built the company to the point where those hires were worth making. Both capable. Neither with a shared idea of what good leadership looked like here.
Decisions ran to the CEO. Not by design and not through any formal escalation path, but because informal relationships were the fastest route through the business and everyone knew it. That works at the size they were. It does not survive doubling.
Collaboration across the team was thin and transparency thinner. Leaders were strong inside their own domains and weak at the seams between them.
And leadership skill varied more than the room realised. Some leaders were already role-modelling what the next phase required and did not know it. Others were not, and did not know that either.
The commercial ambition had outgrown the leadership habits. That was the problem.
What did we do?
A short engagement, built on the four parts of the Careeryse system and compressed into weeks rather than months.
Insight. Leadership Baseline+ across the senior management team. Structured 360, 7-10 minutes per respondent, each leader rated by the people around them against a self-assessment.
Strategic Interpretation. The data was read at team level, not only leader level, and returned as an executive insights report: where capability was strong, where leadership was being experienced inconsistently, where self-view and peer view had come apart, and five priority recommendations. Scale Accelerators and Scale Drags named and separated.
Develop. One offsite, in three acts.
First, the team built its own definition of leadership excellence for this next phase rather than being handed one. What they generated became the raw material for the contract they signed that afternoon.
Second, each leader opened their own baseline report - their strengths, and the shadow those strengths cast in overdrive, invisible to its owner and obvious to everyone else. Then the sharpest exercise of the day: leadership debt. Where am I slowing this team down without realising it, and which habit that got me here do I now have to unlearn?
Third, commitments. Each leader named one behavioural shift for the next thirty days, the micro-habits that would make it observable, and who would hold them to it.
Reinforce. Two mechanisms, both built in the room. Individually: an accountability partner for each leader and a definition of what success looked like in thirty days. Collectively: a leadership contract - the team's own commitments, with an agreed method for holding each other to them.
Commitments made privately to a coach are easy to abandon. Commitments made out loud, to peers holding the same data, are considerably harder.
How was leadership measured?
What was measured. Leadership behaviour across the five fixed dimensions of the Leadership Baseline+ framework: Self Leadership, Communication, Relationships, Organisational Intelligence and Developing Others. Peer-rated on a six-point scale, alongside each leader's self-assessment.
When. Once, before the offsite.
What it showed. The average peer score across the senior team was 4.35 out of 6, with no critical behavioural red flags in the group. Scores across the five dimensions clustered tightly between 4.3 and 4.5, with Communication and Organisational Intelligence the strongest.
The average concealed the finding. Capability was strong but unevenly held: a 1.6-point spread on a six-point scale separated the team's strongest leaders from its weakest. Leadership was experienced differently depending on which leader you dealt with, and that variance produced the alignment loops, the unclear escalation paths and the decisions that kept running to the CEO.
The self-versus-peer comparison found the second pattern. Some of the strongest leaders were under-claiming their impact by as much as 1.04 points - excellent leaders whose influence was not felt across the business because they did not think of themselves as setting the standard. Others over-claimed, mostly by smaller margins. The awareness gaps clustered around how people led, not what they delivered.
Limitations. Three.
The instrument was run once. There is no second read, so nothing here evidences behaviour change. The engagement was scoped to produce a baseline and a set of commitments, and that is what it produced.
A senior team of this size means few raters per leader. The direction of the findings is clear. The precision of any individual score is not.
The outcomes below are commitments and stated intentions. They are not measured behaviour and are not presented as it.
What changed?
The team saw its own distribution. The variance had been invisible to the people producing it, including to several of the leaders doing it best.
Every leader left with a named behavioural shift, an accountability partner and a thirty-day definition of success. The team left with a leadership contract it had written itself.
The engagement closed with the sponsor asking how to build on the work across the following year.
A senior team that can see itself, and a sponsor who wants the next step. That is what this engagement was scoped to produce.
Whether the commitments made in that room became behaviour their people could see is a question only a second baseline can answer.